THE NEW YORKER, MAY 9, 2016
39
friend, Viet Dinh, recalled that he met
Bharara in an introductory government
seminar. "Our first assignment was to
determine whether the Framers set up
the American government based on the
idea that man was essentially bad or
that man was essentially good," Dinh
said. "We left class and wound up talking
all night. I argued 'bad,' and Preet ar-
gued 'good.' I am more skeptical. Preet
is more optimistic."
Bharara was a Democrat, and Dinh
a Republican, who went on to serve as a
senior o cial in George W. Bush's Jus-
tice Department. Despite their political
di erences, the two have remained close
friends. (Bharara was the best man at
Dinh's wedding.) "People think that be-
cause Preet is a prosecutor he sees only
the underbelly of society, but he funda-
mentally believes in the goodness of man
and that government can ennoble soci-
ety," Dinh said. "He sees all the bad, but
he sees his job as a way to foster good."
After Harvard, Bharara went to
Columbia Law School. "My wife never
wants me to say this, but I was not a good
attender of classes," Bharara told me.
(Bharara and his wife, Dalya, a nonprac-
ticing lawyer, live in Westchester; they
have three children.) He figured he could
read the texts. "I think the only class
in which I had a perfect attendance re-
cord was trial practice," he said. A vet-
eran of the Southern District taught the
class, which fixed Bharara's ambition to
become a federal prosecutor. In ,
Mary Jo White o ered him a job as an
A.U.S.A. "It was the best day of my life,"
Bharara said. "It was awesome."
Vinit Bharara followed Preet to Co-
lumbia Law School but, after practic-
ing law briefly, became an entrepreneur.
His first venture, which included Preet
as an investor, did not thrive. Then he
and a partner went into the diaper busi-
ness. Preet, of course, became the U.S.
Attorney. He said, "I have subpoena
power, I'm chief federal law-enforce-
ment o cer in Manhattan, Bronx, and
six other counties. So I'm thinking I'm
winning the family competition, and
my brother calls me and he's, like,
'I'm going to sell diapers.' I said, 'Knock
yourself out, man, I still got subpoena
power.' " Vinit's company, diapers.com
("We're No. in No. "), went on to be
acquired by Amazon in . Preet told
me, "That's my brother's way of saying,
'Hey, bro, I see your whole U.S. Attor-
ney thing, and I raise you five hundred
and forty-five million dollars.' "
S prosecutors tra-
ditionally conduct roasts of depart-
ing colleagues. When Richard Zabel,
Bharara's longtime deputy, left the o ce
last year for the private sector, Bharara
sang a farewell to the tune of "Ameri-
can Pie." In his response, Zabel said,
"Since I left the o ce, everyone has been
asking me the same question. Have I
seen 'Billions'?"The television series, on
Showtime, features the pursuit by an
aggressive U.S. Attorney, played by Paul
Giamatti, of a Wall Street billionaire for
insider trading. It is widely thought to
have been inspired by Bharara's long-
term investigation of Steven Cohen, the
founder of SAC Capital Advisors; there
is also a fanciful subplot involving
sadomasochistic sex. "The truth is, I
haven't seen it yet," Zabel said. "But I
did see a clip, where a woman in a dom-
inatrix outfit stands astride our shirtless
U.S. Attorney, burning him with a cig-
arette and then urinating on him."Zabel
added, "I am surprised how since I left
they have lost control of his image."
Before Bharara became known as
the scourge of insider trading---a
Time cover story called him the "top
cop" of Wall Street---he gained atten-
tion for the cases he did not bring against
the financial industry. He took o ce in
, at the height of the mortgage
crisis, and the Southern District, along
with the Justice Department, in Wash-
ington, conducted investigations of the
major firms and individuals involved in
the financial collapse. No leading exec-
utive was prosecuted. Bernie Sanders,
the Presidential candidate, says in his
stump speech, "It is an outrage that
not one major Wall Street executive
has gone to jail for causing the near-
collapse of the economy. The failure to
prosecute the crooks on Wall Street
for their illegal and reckless behavior
is a clear indictment of our broken
criminal-justice system."
In a conversation in his o ce, Bha-
rara rejected the critique. Without going
into specifics, he said that his team had
looked at Wall Street executives and
found no evidence of criminal behav-
ior. "It shouldn't come as a surprise
to anyone that the things that we had
either been assigned before I got here or
had the initiative to look at were looked
at really, really carefully and really, re-
ally hard by the best people in the o ce,"
he said. "There's a natural frustration,
given how bad the consequences were
for the country, that more people didn't
go to prison for it, because it's clearly
true that when you see a bad thing hap-
pen, like you see a building go up in
flames, you have to wonder if there's
arson. You have to wonder if there's any-
body prosecuting. Now, sometimes it's
not arson, it's an accident. Sometimes
it is arson, and you can't prove it."
Eric Holder, who, as Attorney Gen-
eral, was Bharara's boss for six years, made
a similar point. "Do you honestly think
that Preet Bharara and all those hot-
shots in the U.S. Attorney's o ce would
not have made those cases if they could?"
he said. "Those are career-making cases.
Those cases are your ticket. The fight
would have been over who got to try
them. We just didn't have the evidence."
Instead, Bharara brought cases for
insider trading, many based on inves-
tigations that began before his arrival
in the o ce. One of Bharara's prede-
cessors, Michael Garcia, had obtained
wiretaps on the phones of Raj Rajarat-
nam, a billionaire who founded the
hedge fund Galleon Group. The F.B.I.
arrested Rajaratnam, and prosecutors
showed that he used a network of well-
placed tipsters, including Rajat Gupta,
the former managing director of the
consulting firm McKinsey & Company,
to illicitly gain about seventy-two mil-
lion dollars through stock trading for
Galleon Group.
There was little ambiguity about the
criminality of Rajaratnam's intentions.
In one tape played at trial, he called a
contact and said, "I heard yesterday
from somebody who's on the board of
Goldman Sachs that they are going to
lose two dollars per share." Rajaratnam
quickly traded his shares, avoiding major
losses, thanks to this inside information.
Convicted in , he was sentenced to
eleven years in prison, and given a
ten-million-dollar fine, along with an
order to forfeit more than fifty-three
million in gains. (Gupta, who was also
a board member at Goldman, was later
convicted of insider trading as well.)
Bharara followed up with a series of
prosecutions of less well-known figures,